


Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

by savithny



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Afghanistan, Angst, BAMF!John, Childbirth, Doctor and a Soldier, Flashbacks, Gen, Little bit of church but no preaching, Military, NOT a kidfic!, POV Minor Character, PTSD, Post Reichenbach, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-02
Updated: 2012-09-02
Packaged: 2017-11-13 10:05:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savithny/pseuds/savithny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Reichenbach, John and his old comrade meet for a drink and a talk.   They both know that there's nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, but Billie's got an important request.</p><p>Other character POV of John, carrying on, even without that one last miracle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

**Author's Note:**

> Not Britpicked, but self-checked for known issues.

Billie Murray finishes typing the text message and pauses.   It’s been months since she’s seen him – too long, really, and she feels guilty about it, though it’s not like she’s been avoiding him.  She’s just been very busy, and more than a little distracted by life.   She re-reads the words:

_Going to be in London for a few days next week.  Grab a pint, usual place?_

She grimaces.  It’s too light?   Too casual?   Maybe she should just put it off until she can schedule something better? 

No.   This needs doing.  

She presses Send.

*****

Billie is well onto her second lemon and lime when Captain Watson finally arrives.  She puts the glass down on the bar, suddenly nervous,  and stands up, yanking her sleeves down and fidgeting her shoulders to put her collar straight.

Watson pauses in the doorway, letting his eyes transition from the brightness outside, before he scans the pub for a familiar face.   Billie raises her hand to shoulder height before she manages to convert her instinctive salute into a silly sort of wave.   He smiles a wry half-smile at that and heads for her. 

As he makes his way across the room, Billie can see that John has a fairly pronounced limp.   Not as serious as he’d had when she’d seen him after he’d returned to London after his months of treatment and rehabilitation.  But noticeable, and certainly enough to cause him problems getting daily tasks done.    He isn’t using a cane, though.   And his face shows nothing but an honest smile of pleasure to be seeing her, even as her own smile has faltered with concern.

Finally, he stands in front of her, next to the bar.   They each stretch out a hand in greeting, gripping the other’s fingers firmly, and then they each simultaneously pull the other closer into a broad, comradely embrace, complete with back patting and finishing with their hands grasping the other’s shoulders firmly.  

John releases her first, thumping her shoulder one last time.   “Wasn’t sure I’d be able to get close enough to hug you, for a minute!”   He gestures down at her distended abdomen.   “You and Robbie wasted no time after the wedding, eh?”

“With both of us civilians now, there didn’t seem to be much reason to wait,” she replies. 

“Well,” John says, quietly.   “It suits you.”

Billie fills the silence that rises up between them by hailing the woman behind the bar and ordering John a pint of what she remembers as his usual.   She disregards his protest at her paying for his drink, waving her hand at him.   “If I can’t have a pint just now, I’ll stand you one and enjoy it vicariously.”    He shrugs at that and accepts the glass as she pushes it towards him.

“Get a table, then? “ He asks, gesturing with his glass.   She picks up her own drink and mock-bows, indicating he should lead the way. 

His limp, from behind, is more pronounced. 

“You should be using your cane, Watson,” she tells him, flatly.

“Limp’s not real anyway, _Murray_ ,” he replies, scowling for a moment before sliding into the bench seat along the wall, leaving the chair for her.  In the past, he’s always hung back for her to sit first, and she realizes this is a courtesy – allowing her a chair that can be pushed further from the table to make room for her increased girth.   She braces herself and drops heavily down into the seat with an audible exhale.   He shakes his head and smiles again.  

“You’ve got a ways to grow yet, Billie,” he says.  “What are you, thirty weeks?”

“Thirty-two.   If he comes a bit early, like I did, I could be done in a bit more than a month.” 

“He?  Definitely a he, or just a guess?”

“Definitely.   I, well, I don’t deal as well with . . .  surprises . . . as I did once upon a time.”

He shrugs, casually, makes a “ah, touché” sort of face, and she takes the bull by the horns, so to speak. 

“The leg, Johnny?   I thought the limp had cleared up?   I thought…..”

He meets her eye, considers his answer.   “It did.  It had.   It came back.”

“It came back after?”  She can’t say it, now that she’s at the point.  It’s in her brain, on her tongue, but she stops.  She doesn’t say _after he jumped._   But John knows what she’s not saying. 

“It came back.   After.”   He licks his lips, pauses, restarts.  “It’s not always this bad, though.   I don’t need the cane.   Well, most days I don’t.  Today, though?”   He gestures, a wide sweep of his hand that encompasses the pub, Billie, his leg.    “At least it mostly works, right?   Lots of people deal with worse.”

“Bloody right they do,” she responds, taking the cue from him.   “Lots of people don’t have a leg to have phantom DVT pains in at all.”   It’s a game they used to play, between patients back at Bastion.   A darkly humorous contest of schadenfreude, ticking off all the ways in which things might be worse at that moment, often culminating in threats of zombie apocalypse or forced viewings of Hugh Grant movies. 

“Well, if someone hadn’t stuck that tube down my throat, I might not have spent two weeks on a ventilator and developed the damn clot at all,” he tosses back with a grim smile.

“People who get themselves shot and compromise their bloody airways don’t get to turn down the crich tube,” she replies.  And now she’s not smiling at all. 

They face each other across the table, considering each other.   The stillness isn’t the awkward silence that falls between friends that have grown apart, but the comfort of being with someone who _knows how bad it really was_ , someone for whom there is no need to dissemble.  

John clears his throat, reaches across the table to put his hand over hers.   “I have never thanked you for getting me out of there,” he says.   “I don’t remember a lot of it, honestly.  But I remember being so glad it was you there with us when it went to shite.”

She shakes her head.   “I didn’t do anything that a dozen other nurses wouldn’t have….”

“Dozen other nurses wouldn’t have kept their heads together to keep _any_ of us alive, let alone had the brains and hands to do it, Billie.   You were a better flight medic than that twat Carpenter, for all he’s an actual surgeon.”

“It was damned luck anyone made it home, Johnny, and you know it.”  She sighed.  “Henderson deserved his commendation for that landing, to start with.  You know the Americans lost one of their Chinooks later that month?    Same circumstances as us, but they crash landed and burned.”  She shudders, imagining being trapped by her webbing in twisted, flaming wreckage. 

She doesn’t have to imagine the smell of burnt human flesh.  That, she knows.

The smell of blood she knows too, and picturing the American crash reminds her of it, of kneeling in the back of the MERT helicopter, her hands clamped over the lumpy, blasted hole in her Captain’s shoulder, desperately stuffing it with gauze as his breathing begins to have a liquid gurgling choke to it because there’s blood someplace it shouldn’t be, in his throat or lungs or chest cavity or all of it.   And Liam Donohue, who should be taking vitals for one of the men they’d come to get, on the floor screaming for his mum again, and Danny McFetters, on her other side, struggling to check on the double amputee on the stretcher but needs to wipe away the blood streaming from his gashed forehead,  broken nose and split lip, blinded by sweat and blood and tears, spitting teeth onto the floor next to the patient.   And their security team has just thrown the body of the tail gunner back onto the ramp, and he’s snarled and dangling awkwardly in his safety harness and is so very clearly far past medical help.   And there’s no gunfire now, and no roar of the rotors, and so the only sounds as she works are the sounds of people:  Cursing and praying and begging and choking and moaning and dying.  And calling her name.   Everyone calling it and she can’t help everyone….   Over and over and….

“Billie?”   It’s not a plea or a scream, but gently concerned, and there’s a tap on her wrist, firm but not sharp, and she looks up, or down, or back into _now_ , and it’s Captain Watson – no, it’s _John_ , and he’s rubbing the back of her hand where it rests on the table. 

“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry, John,” she mutters.   “Went away there for a bit. “

“Recognized the signs,” he replies.  “Familiar with the process.  I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have even taken us there.”

“No, it’s alright,” she protests.  “I need to be able to think about it sometimes.  And you .. well, you get it.”

He does understand.   Well enough that he expertly steers the conversation into safer territory, gets her talking about what she and Robbie are doing back in England and what they’ve been getting up to since their wedding the previous year.   She describes Robbie’s work for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, flying medical evacuations across the northeast.   He gets to do what he did in the RAF, she tells John, but without that pesky gunfire.    No need for a door gunner when you’re flying over Scarborough, really.  

“True,” he says.  “But I might want one going into Middlesbrough,” he deadpans.  

She punches his shoulder, laughing.  “You know that’s where I’m working, now, you berk.”

“Really?”   John says.  “That explains why your accent’s stronger than it used to be, for sure.”   He’s teasing her, she hears it in his tone, recognizes it from time spent each twitting the other about their origins. 

She nods.   “You know I grew up not far from there, ya daft apeth!   I’ve always talked like this.  And Robbie’s mum’s from up that way and we wanted to be near her.”

“Where are you working, then?  University hospital?”  At her affirming hum, he continues, “With your skills, I imagine they were happy to have you there.   They’ve got a strong A&E and trauma team, I’ve heard.”

“Well, they’d be happier if I worked A&E, for sure,” she admits.   “I got taken on in the neonatal unit, though.  I’m learning new skills and it’s mostly happy work.”

John raises his hands to indicate he’s not offering an argument.   “If its what you want….”

“I notice you’re not working trauma either,” she replies.   “If I recall, you went into medicine after a thrilling ambulance ride-along when you were in secondary school, right?    And last time we talked, you were giving measles jabs and treating ear infections.”

“Still doing it,” he tells her.   “And arthritic joints and diabetes and high blood pressure, too.   I’m in a community clinic now.   Most of the x-rays I’m reading are to rule out pneumonia.   I even deliver babies, on occasion.”  He winks, but she refuses to rise to that bait.

“Do you miss it at all?” she asks, wondering.  “You were damn good at it.”

“So were you.   And yet here we both are.”

She addresses the question he didn’t answer, herself.   “I miss it sometimes.   But I worked A&E when I first mustered out, while I waited for Robbie to finish up his tour.  And I kept getting so _angry_.    Most of it wasn’t real trauma, just daft twats messing about and getting injured.   When I got dressed down for telling some city councilman exactly how stupid I thought his little drink driving hobby was, I knew it was time to find a new specialty.”

“They didn’t sack you for it?” 

“Fuck no, Johnny!  We’re war heroes!   I got _referred_ for _special counseling_.    Anger management.   PTSD therapy, the works.”

They exchange another look of comradeship across the table, another acceptance of their shared history and its shared outcome.

“So, did it work?” he asks.

“The therapy?  Well, I’m working and I haven’t killed anyone yet.  So I suppose it did.    Still have issues with blood, though.”  She laughs.  “Can’t even eat rare beef, let alone cook it.”

Because what she remembers, more than John Watson trying to shield Liam from further injury as he desperately scrabbles to keep them from sliding out the rear door, more than the dangling gunner who had died in the same hail of bullets that hit John, more than the sound of Liam screaming and screaming and _screaming_ until he died with a scream still rattling in his throat, is the _blood_.   Liam’s, and John’s, and Danny’s and the gunner’s and both patients’ – all puddling across the floor where she knelt trying to help them, soaking her knees, seeping into her socks, smearing across her face when she tried to wipe the sweat from her eyes so she could _see_ to even _place the damn tubes._   She can picture the handprints Liam left on her sleeves as he grabbed at her, the smudges across her thighs from propping John up to strip off his amoured vest.  She remembers how warm it was on her skin, and how cool and sticky it was by the time she heard their rescuers approaching, the throb of helicopter rotors breaking the horrible silence that had descended.

John is stroking the back of her hand again.   “I remember that, sort of,” he says.  “I remember watching you carrying the foot of the stretcher and trying to do the math on pints of blood in the human body.   And then trying to remember the second line of _Dulce et Decorum Est.”_ He laughs, bitterly.  “Remember Bates and his war literature reading group?”

“I did, then, John.   _Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,_ in living color.    You’ve seen the picture, I assume?”

“Actually, I hadn’t, until Sherlock asked me about it once, not long before  . . .  But yes, I have, now.   It won some award, right?”

A freelance photographer had been at the landing zone when the Pedro team landed at Bastion and offloaded the wounded and the dead.  He’d captured her walking down the ramp, dazed and blood-besmirched, being greeted by medical staff who had taken her elbows and led her, unresisting,  to someplace they could wash away other people’s blood to check her for her own injuries.   And found none.   All that blood and none of it hers, the only one of the team who walked out without a scratch.

“He got some war reporting prize in America.   I’m a _symbol._ ‘They washed me from the turret with a hose,’ and all that.” 

He grimaces.   “Sherlock was surprisingly restrained in questioning me about it, thankfully. “   He chuckles, darkly.   “Well, there are worse things to be famous for, Billie.   At least its not sex tapes and the dog you keep in your purse.”

The conversational detour through war poetry reminds her.  “I’ve got something of yours,” she tells him, digging through her bag.  “I’d borrowed it right before you got sent home, and then kept forgetting to send it to you.   When we moved boxes to set up the baby’s room last month, I found it again.”   She finds the item, hands the battered paperback book to him.  “It’s your copy of _Slaughterhouse Five_.  The one Harry gave you before your first tour.”

He takes it from her, almost gingerly.   “She gave it to me as a reminder ‘Not to engage in any massacres.’   Not subtle, my sister.”

“Does being at the receiving end of a massacre count?”   Billie wonders aloud. 

“I’d imagine so,” he answers.   “Harry was furious at me the whole time I was in hospital.   When she wasn’t crying in relief that I was alive.”

Harry wasn’t the only one, Billie thinks.   Their entire unit had followed the ups and downs of Captain Watson’s recovery closely.  Anyone with any news to share had passed it on, all of them waiting, tensely, through his evacuation back to England, the initial surgeries, the complications, the infections.  When they’d finally received word he was being discharged to rehabilitation, they’d taken up a collection and had a large care package delivered for him.

And while they were all waiting together, Billie hadn’t realized the size of the gap he’d left behind.   They had drawn together, darning a patch over the hole his departure made in the unit, but as they turned back to their regular lives in the aftermath, she found herself crushingly alone.  Not romantically – she’d never lacked for male companionship of that sort when she wanted it.  But she and Watson had been _mates_.   His “Three Continents” reputation aside, they’d come to a mutual and mostly unspoken understanding that sex was off the table, and after that had come honest friendship.  

He was one of the few people in their unit who read the same sorts of books she did, and they traded treasured paperbacks sent from home and discussed them afterwards.   He was the one who listened as she processed the difficult cases, the one with whom she’d talked over traumatic or heartwrenching days.   And after the most difficult, traumatic, heartwrenching day they ever shared …. He was gone.

She clears her throat.  “Yeah, well,” she says, “You gave us all a fright, you did.”

John has let the book fall open where it will.   “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” he recites.   And then he laughs.    “Billie Murray and John Watson, as well, hey?”

She raises an eyebrow at him and waits for him to go on.

“My counseling for the PTSD?  The therapist used to talk a lot about how important it was to live in the present, not at the moment of trauma.   ‘Live in the now, John,’ she’d say.   ‘Focus on what’s happening today, John.’   It’s why she told me to start the damn blog.   Writing about what was happening in the present was supposed to keep me from living in the past.   Except that nothing was happening in the present until I met Sherlock.”

And there, he’s said it, named the elephant in the room, the name she was unable to bring herself to say earlier.   

“With him, I was constantly diverted, always in the moment, ever ready to catch some falling chainsaw or leap into a cab to go to an unknown destination.   There was no fucking _time_ to live in the past, no time to worry about the future – only just enough time to keep up with the present.   And my leg?  Was fine.  And the hand?   Steady as a rock.   I'd been unstuck in time, and he grounded me again.”

She’s the one to reach out this time, to tentatively touch hands again.   “You said your leg wasn’t always bad, though?   You’re not . . . back where you were before?”

He shakes his head.   “Not there.  I can’t go back to that place.”

She doesn’t know if he means the bleak, awful, bedsit or just the gray blankness that had overtaken him after he was invalided home.  She remembers their meeting, just weeks before he told her he had a new flatmate and started posting stories of his adventures online.   He’d been empty-faced and nearly unresponsive, and she’d been so deep in her own conflict and misery that she’d been unable to do more than sit next to him and drink far too many pints of cheap lager. 

The man she’d seen that day had been nothing like the man she’d known before.   Or the man she was sitting with today.  She was glad to see that despite the new lines on his face and grey in his hair, this man was still recognizably the Captain Watson they’d all put their faith and trust behind.

“So yeah.   I’ve been better, really.   But he gave me so much, and I can’t turn my back on that.  So . . . “   he trails off.

“So you carry on,” she finishes for him.  

“Life goes on,” he agrees.   “You live, and you lose, and then –“  he gestures at her belly. 

“John, if you start singing that _Circle of Life_ crap at me, we are going to have serious words,” she warns him.  

“Don’t worry,” he says with a grimace.  “But it’s true.  Like Vonnegut says, ‘Even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.’   Sherlock gave me back my life, and I’m hanging onto that.  By my fingertips, some days, its true.”   He shakes his head. 

She realizes now is the time to say what she’s wanted to say since she called to set this up.   “Captain Watson,” she begins, and he sits up straighter at her formality.   “ She continues, “Robbie and I would be very much honored if you would be godfather to our son, when the time comes.“ 

He stares a moment, smiles at her.   “Only if you name him Hamish for me.”

She shakes her head, chiding him.   “He’s John Robert, for both grandfathers, his father – and for you, you right git.”   

He’s obviously touched now, and clears his throat before replying.  “It would be a privilege, Lieutenant Murray,” he says, mirroring her earlier formality.   A wicked smirk passes across his face as he adds, “You just need me to stand up in church, right?   I’m not expected to deliver the wee lad?”

“Fuck no!”   She slaps him, playfully, across the shoulder – not the bad one – and adds, “This is not your chance to see bits of my insides, thank you.”

“And we’ve already inadvertently shared more than enough bodily fluids,” he adds.   

She realizes they’re joking, now, about those desperate moments in the Chinook, his blood smearing her arms and cheeks, her sweat dripping from under her helmet onto his face.  They’re joking about their own massacre.

He clearly realizes it at the same moment.    They share another look of understanding, and she changes the subject, abruptly.   It’s not an easier subject, but it’s important, now, that she say it.

“I’ve seen the graffiti, around London, since I’ve been down here this week,” she says.  “The ‘I believe in Sherlock Holmes’ tags.”

John nods.   “They started going up not long after – after it happened.”

“I didn’t know the man,” she says, slowly.   “But you did, as well as anyone could.   And I do know you.    You’re the best judge of a person I’ve ever met, and if you believed him?   Well, I  --- I believe in John Watson.”   

 ***

In the end, it’s longer than a month before Robbie gets to send off a mass email to the list of people who need to be informed of the arrival of John Robert Harrison, healthy and howling and 8 pounds 12 ounces.   Little John takes his time, arriving on his own schedule a week after his due date, but he comes at home, as she’d hoped.    Hospitals mean fear and death to her, even if she works in them, and she wanted her baby to be born in a place without those connotations.   He takes his first breath as the sunrise streams early daylight into her own bedroom, with Robbie laughing and crying beside her and his mum in the kitchen fixing breakfast porridge for the midwife and her assistants to eat when everything is cleaned up and the cats mewling behind the closed  door, and it’s the most alive and awestruck she has ever felt.

It’s only a few hours after the birth announcement goes out that the doorbell rings and its not flowers,  its food – curry and bread from their favorite restaurant, though how John knew where it was, she doesn’t have the capacity to think about.   There’s a note along with it, in the bag: “Are you sure he doesn’t look more like a Hamish?”

In another month, on a gorgeous spring day, she sees John Watson again.   In the ancient village church where her husband’s family has worshipped for generations, he stands across the font from her, holding her firstborn son as the vicar dips water across him, promising to renounce the Devil and all his works on her son’s behalf and to help him strive for justice and peace.

It feels less like a ritual and more like a personal promise, the way John says it.  It’s the ancient pledge of a knight to his lord, a king to his people.    John Watson is a man who takes his vows seriously, and it feels like her son is gaining a guardian angel.  

She tries to tell him that, in the churchyard afterwards, as everyone is milling about trying to get photographs and getting directions back to Robbie’s mum’s house, where there will be tea and cake and punch.    He doesn’t deny it, either.  

“The gift of joy and wonder in all his works,” John says, repeating the words from the ceremony that’s just finished.  “It’s our job to see that he gets that.   Which is only fair, really, because he’s a joy and wonder himself.”   He strokes the back of his forefinger along the little forehead. 

“It’s hard to come unstuck in time when there’s nappies that need changing,” she says. 

Robbie comes up beside her then, to nudge her towards the gates and the path back to the village.   She falls in next to him as they begin the walk back to the house, where his aunties have already gone and are setting out the food.   The rest of the party follow, John with Robbie’s mum, her sister with her husband, the other friends and family who have come out to greet the newest addition.   Its almost a formal procession, in the dappled sunlight under the trees, and the solemnity seems to lay a hush over them all, stepping across the stones that have seen a thousand years of babies crossing to be named and coffins crossing to be buried. 

And over the silence, the birds are singing in the trees.

**Author's Note:**

> Part of my continuing theme of looking at John from different points of view. 
> 
> I’ve thought a lot about post-Reichenbach John, about how he might move on, what might happen after. I prefer to think that Sherlock's jump wouldn’t break him, or even put him back to his pre-Sherlock baseline. His speech in the graveyard at the end of 2x03 isn’t the speech of a man who can’t go on, but one who knows he has to, and can.
> 
> This lives in the same universe as my other Sherlock pieces, and shares the same backstory. Bill Murray's a woman because they damn well send women to Afghanistan now, where they put their lives on the line to save people alongside the men.
> 
> One quote from Randall Jarrell, _The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner._ Title, and several quotes, from Kurt Vonnegut’s _Slaughterhouse Five._
> 
> “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?”


End file.
